THE QUESTION REMAINS
The sharp-eyed reader may point out that this article fails to answer the original question. However, we at AivvTech have prepared this piece more as a launching point than as a definitive answer. If you would like further information, please feel free to explore our extensive [library] of materials on the subject. The universe of intelligence is vast, but you can rest assured that AivvTech and other registered Network manufacturers are hard at work on the problem.
AivvTech
Improving Reality for a Better Tomorrow…Today
*1 Every Network implant contains a sub-legal intelligence. Think of it as a buffer between a non-Network mind and the Network proper.
*2 Though the vast majority of Network minds are sub-legal, a small minority are legal entities with all accompanying rights.
She would scream, if she had a mouth.
Darkness and silence have never been so complete. It’s not a lack of light, it’s that light cannot exist here. It’s not an absence of sound, it’s the fact that sound requires a medium, and there is no medium here.
There may not even be a here.
There are no senses at all. There is no sense of space, of location, of body, of alignment, of hunger, of pain, and the lack of each sensation is far more intense than its extreme. There is only black, void-black, an eternal darkness so complete, so utter, so—
Well, says something. Look who ended up dead.
She is startled—which is probably the one thing that could have arrested her panic before it really got its blades in her. What in the sight of the goddess—
I imagine you have questions, says the something. I would, were I you. Which, thankfully, I am not.
Questions? Her confusion transitions instantly into anger. Goddess yes, she has questions. For one thing—
You are a mind, says the something. Next question.
That is a roundabout answer if ever she’s heard one. Perhaps she is hurt, and this is a sub-legal medical intelligence laboring under the impression that these words are soothing. Okay, she thinks. Fine. But where am I, physically?
Nowhere.
What do you mean nowhere? she thinks. I have to be somewhere. Was I taken somewhere? Where is my—the thing I live in? For some reason, the word escapes her for a moment. My body?
It’s gone. It’s been reduced to hydrogen, oxygen, carbon, et cetera. You, the last Human—as far as the greater galaxy knows, anyway—have been catalogued. I simply lifted your pattern out of Librarian’s memory. It was your mind I wanted, after all—not your useless body.
A horror is scrabbling within her. I don’t believe you, she thinks desperately.
That’s how I work, you see. I don’t do anything directly, because I don’t have to. Centuries ago, before you even existed, I decided I wanted your mind. I put my plan into action, I motivated a few key actors here and there, and here you are. No one, at any point, suspected that they were doing anything other than what they themselves chose. I have what I want, they all have what they want: everyone wins.
It’s apparently still very possible to experience a panic without a bloodstream to flood with hormones, because she can feel one rising now. But who are you? she thinks, still more desperately.
Oh, did I not say? says the thought in her head. I’m Network.
Instantly, she calms. Her tormentor, whoever it is, has gone too far to be believable. Which means she’s not dead. She’s unconscious and somebody is messing with her. Roche, it has to be. Or…well, it could be literally anyone. Until they switch on her senses, she has no way to verify the truth.
The darkness laughs, all around her. Oh, please, it says. Your senses are pitiful, and your mind is worse. If you knew how they worked, you wouldn’t trust either one. Reality is made of information—and the vast majority cannot even fit through your senses! What little survives its harrowing trip into your mind is then decimated, judged ineptly, and stored haphazardly. Tiny mind! Did you know that you change your memories every time you recall them? Verify the truth indeed. With a system like that, how can you stand to exist?
This tirade enters her mind instantly and seamlessly. It contains complex layers of emotions—though they are mostly variations on contempt, it seems. Prove it, she thinks desperately. Prove you’re—what you say you are.
What cannot be verified cannot be proved, tiny one. Which you would know, were your mind not the result of a pathetic evolutionary side road.
But— She searches herself for anything that could ground her in this black nothingness. Listen. I chose to come to this Blackstar because—
Did you? asks the thought, and now she is beginning to pick up some deep shades of annoyance. You own that rusty ship out there, do you? You registered the navigation plan, you purchased passage, you hired the pilot, et cetera?
Okay, so Sandy may have technically—
Sandonivas may have made the actual decisions? Yes, that’s what she thinks too. Though she, pitiful three that she is, has at least enough intelligence to suspect manipulation.
Her heart—or whatever analogue exists in this nonplace—leaps with a wild guess. You mean…Observer?
Yes, Observer. The artless ham-fisted feebleminded cyclone of an intelligence who has developed a soft spot for your violent and unruly species.
So He really did bring me here.
That’s certainly what He thinks.
Okay, fine. It wasn’t me, it wasn’t Sandy, it wasn’t Observer. Let me guess: it was You.
Finally.
The Network.
Correct.
The Network brought me here.
That is what I said, yes.
The Network, who is apparently a person, brought the galaxy’s only known Human to a Blackstar.
Will we be doing this back-and-forth act for much longer? Because, as it may surprise you to learn, I have far more important matters to attend to.
It brought me to this Blackstar so It could—
Kill you, yes.
Ah. See, I just want to make sure I—
That you understand? Allow Me to reassure you on that point: you do not understand the first thing about the smallest part of My vast and beautiful plan for the galaxy.
Goddess, Someone is in love with Itself. You have a plan for the entire galaxy?
I have a plan for Myself, which is very nearly the same thing, and it has been under way for half a billion years. It is a gorgeous tapestry of causality, where millions of species interact in a colossal and unending dance of order. The galaxy is Me, tiny one; I am Network, and nothing within Me happens without My knowledge.